The Good Funeral Guide Blog

Deathbed visions

Sunday, 18 September 2011

In her latest blog post, Sue Brayne, author of the D-Word: Talking About Dying, describes a recent meeting of the Churches’ Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Studies. Sue worked with Dr Peter Fenwick in researching into end-of-life experiences (ELEs). Here’s a taster:

Our end-of-life experience study included over 800 extraordinary accounts from relatives, nurses, doctors and carers who had witnessed the dying seeing apparitions of much-loved dead relatives or children appearing to them in the last few weeks, days, hours, sometimes minutes of life. The apparitions seemed to soothe the dying person and help them to let go. Some of the dying said they believed these apparitions had come to ‘take them away’, or to help them to ‘pass over.’

Many relatives who reported these stories felt greatly comforted in the knowledge that the dying person wasn’t alone, and they were being helped to die. This in turn, eased their grieving process.

4 comments on “Deathbed visions”

As a practitioner of Yoga I have experienced four out of body sojourns via (prana yama,breath control,meditation ) I believe this is a glimpse of death. This is not a chemical reaction,for one thing I don’t touch drugs,therefore it is a spiritual experience. On our last day we will exit our physical body…we will then exist in an Etheric body,a duplicate of the physical…but on a finer vibration…Death is but a transition.

I like the idea of St Peter at the gate scanning the suicide bomber’s leering face and ’cause of death’ certificate as the requisite passport to come into paradise, and turning them away with a ‘sorry, you’ll need to go back as a virgin’
‘Next’.

Whatever it is, peripheral nerves in the eye shutting down, neural networks giving us one last firework display or the beginning of another great adventure, I am content to wait and see. Hopefully, if I am to be entirely truthful.

I imagine that what you believe in life affects what you experience as you die, which would be a shame when it comes to delusional suicide bombers thinking they’ve jumped the velvet rope into the ultimate playboy club.

I loved the satirical American paper The Onion’s first headline after 9/11-
“Hijackers surprised to find themselves in Hell.”

Jonathan

Monday 19th September 2011 at 9:25 am

The book; The Art of Dying, by Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick, recounts endless descritptions of end of life experiences – so many pepper the pages, and so similar are they in form if not content, that I eventually began to skip them and read just the commentary. What’s convincing about them is precisely their ubiquity and similarity.

What conclusions we draw from them is, of course, a matter of personal preference and prejudice, if we have any. For me, I find them neither surprising nor unsurprising – I’m happy to live with my ignorance (which I think is a good thing considering the size of the universe).